CHRISTIAN ABURIME
This is the concluding part on infrastructure of our analyses of the 2026 Anambra State appropriation Budget as presented by Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, CFR.
Infrastructure is the backbone of sustainable development anywhere in the world. It is the trigger of possibilities. Little wonder that in the entire Anambra’s ₦757.9 billion “Changing Gears 3.0” budget for 2026, no single vote carries more weight, literally and figuratively, than the 27.7% year-on-year increase for Infrastructure Investments. This is the largest absolute injection of new money in the budget, and it is no accident.
For Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, infrastructure is not one sector among many; it is the spine that holds every other ambition upright. Without it, factories would remain unreachable, hospitals would sit empty, and children would walk miles to school. With it, everything else becomes possible.
After four relentless years (over 900 kilometres of roads under construction, more than 600 already asphalted at a quality Anambra has rarely seen, eight bridges, the completed Light House Government Complex, new Okpoko haven, Solution Fun City and the quiet miracle of water flowing again in towns that had forgotten the sound), 2026 is the year the state stops merely repairing the past and begins sculpting the future in concrete, steel, and light.
The extra billions in the budget will pour into finishing the strategic beltway of dual-carriage Trunk-A roads that will finally lace Awka, Onitsha, Nnewi, Ekwulobia, and the rest of the state into one seamless economic organism. They will buy new CNG buses and river boats, push the first serious private-sector bids for the long-awaited rail masterplan, and turn the three new cities (Awka 2.0, Greater Niger, and the Aerotropolis) from beautifully drawn masterplans into construction sites humming with cranes and earth-movers.
Water schemes will reach the last local-government headquarters that still ration jerry-cans, while the newly empowered Anambra State Electricity Regulatory Commission will finally open the gates for independent power producers and streetlights that stay on all night.
Flood channels will be widened and deepened in Onitsha and Nnewi, drainage mastered in Awka, and the annual ritual of submerged markets and displaced families will be pushed closer to extinction.
By the end of 2026, a journey that once ate half a day will shrink to an easy hour on smooth, dual-carriage highways. Goods will flow from the new Industrial City to Onitsha port and the cargo airport without the old choking bottlenecks. Land that yesterday was farmland will tomorrow be plotted, serviced, and sold at prices that make diaspora hearts race home. Investors who once dismissed Anambra as “too difficult” will discover a state that moves as fast as their ambitions.
This is the ultimate force multiplier: every naira spent on infrastructure will magnify every naira spent on schools, hospitals, youth skills, and social grants tenfold, because it makes them reachable, usable, profitable.
When the Soludo era is finally judged, historians will not count only the kilometres of road or the megawatts of new power. They will describe how a state that once seemed destined to drown in its own traffic and darkness chose, in one decisive budgetary stroke, to build the physical platform on which an entire century of prosperity would stand.
Thus, the 27.7% surge is more than an allocation. It is the sound of asphalt rolling, of turbines spinning, of water rushing through pipes long dry. It is the sound of Anambra rising, not in slogans, but in the irreversible language of steel and stone.
For Ndi Anambra, the gears of acceleration towards a prosperous smart mega city have changed. The vision is steadily crytalising. The road is open. The future is no longer approaching; it is already under construction, powered by Governor Soludo’s intentional, progressive, dynamic leadership.
Let the solution continue!
